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An Unconvincing Evasion

The whole thing started because Goldfarb thought it would be appropriate to snicker at the fact that Greenwald had estimated China’s annual defense spending at $65 billion. His post was titled “When Lefties Pretend to Know Anything About the Military,” and he sneered at those “who act like they understand military spending but find themselves flummoxed over terms like ‘purchasing power parity.’”

But in truth it is Michael Goldfarb who demonstrates beyond doubt that he is flummoxed over PPP. We can see this in the fact that he refuses to back down from his claim that $450 billion is a “pretty good guess” for Chinese defense spending. It’s not a pretty good guess. It’s absolutely absurd, and if he can find one serious PLA analyst anywhere who will endorse it, I’ll buy him lunch.

For reference, the Pentagon, which has historically offered the high-end estimate of all estimates of Chinese defense spending, argued in 2007 (.pdf) that Chinese defense spending was between $85 and $125 billion, much closer to Greenwald’s estimate than to the one that Goldfarb continues to endorse of $450 billion.

I don’t want to dry up this otherwise juicy conversation with a long discussion of defense economics, but since they’re so central to understanding why the $450 billion figure is absurd, I’ll just refer readers again here. (Goldfarb for some reason omitted the link from his excerpt of my post.) You can’t do what Tkacik does, and just blanket the CIA’s figure for the PLA budget with the PPP converter and then take that number out and run with it. Moreover, the World Bank estimate of the PPP converter for China was recently revised downward by 40 percent, further undermining the figure. Goldfarb seems either uninterested or unaware of this.

There are even more problems with the Ramesh Ponnuru/Goldfarb argument that we should view the entirety of the rest of the world as “criminals” or “arsonists” against whom we should judge our defense budget:

We’d expect the police department to have a budget many times that of all the criminals combined, wouldn’t we? Fire departments spend a lot more fighting arson than arsonists spend.

This is just nuts. Here is a listing of the top 10 defense spenders out there, from Greenwald’s list (I’m not sure whether the rankings are still exactly right, but you get the idea):

These are the “criminals” against whom we are supposed to be arming ourselves? Okay, so Russia and China are on the list, and we aren’t absolutely certain of their intentions. But England?!? Japan? Italy? India? Is it really America Alone, taking on the rest of the world? Please. Is this sort of thing supposed to pass for serious analysis?